As a percentage of the population, the U.S. government workforce is much smaller than 50 years ago

Saturday

May 25, 2013 at 11:15 AM

Back in my school days, mathematics was not my strongest subject — which is why I sometimes try to redeem myself by fighting against certain glaring examples of innumeracy.

The following passage, which I ran across this morning on the Internet, is a case in point:

For much of our nationís history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies....

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Pat Cunningham

Back in my school days, mathematics was not my strongest subject — which is why I sometimes try to redeem myself by fighting against certain glaring examples of innumeracy.

The following passage, which I ran across this morning on the Internet, is a case in point:

For much of our nationís history, the federal government was quite small. In 1790, it had just 1,000 nonmilitary workers. In 1962, there were 2,515,000 federal employees. Today, we have 2,840,000 federal workers in 15 departments, 69 agencies and 383 nonmilitary sub-agencies.

This exponential growth has led to increasing power and independence for agencies....